Saturday, January 30, 2010

A People's History of the United States is a piece of shit. It is badly written, intellectually dishonest and insultingly shallow Marxist propaganda. Needless to say, it served as a college textbook for many years. That anyone would use it in a classroom tells you just about all you need to know about academic historians these days.

Someday I'll make the trek to Zinn's grave, and on it will leave these three books:

In summary, it appears that NWF, like WWF, is spreading a large amount of global warming misinformation, and some news outlets like Washington Post and MSNBC seem to accept it without question.It's that 'without question' part that keeps getting the media weenies in trouble; someone sends them a press release and they report it as if it were confirmed fact instead of doing any, ah, what's that word? Ah yes, reporting, which involves investigating. BEFORE they start talking.

Also from Watts Up,We don’t dispute the fact that there has been some cyclical warming in recent decades — most notably from 1979 to 1998 — but cooling took place from the 1940s to the late 1970s, again after 1998, and especially after 2001, all while CO2 rose. This fact alone questions the primary role in climate change attributed to CO2 by the IPCC, environmental groups, and others.

There was a major station dropout — and an increase in missing data from remaining stations — which occurred suddenly around 1990. Just about the time the global warming issue was being elevated to importance in political and environmental circles.

A clear bias was found towards removing higher elevation, higher latitude, and rural stations — the cooler stations — during this culling process, though that data was not also removed from the base periods from which “averages,” and then anomalies, were computed.

The data also suffers contamination by urbanization and other local factors, such as land-use/land-cover changes and improper siting.

But wait! There's MORE!!Donna Laframboise, who gave us the list of World Wildlife Fund non peer reviewed studies cited in the IPCC AR4 continues to make lists. Here’s her latest list. Those calm, rational, thoughtful folks at Greenpeace seem to have had a significant hand in the IPCC climate bible.

Considered the climate Bible by governments around the world, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is meant to be a scientific analysis of the most authoritative research.

Instead, it references literature generated by Greenpeace – an organization known more for headline-grabbing publicity stunts than sober-minded analysis. (Eight IPCC-cited Greenpeace publications are listed at the bottom of this post.)

In one section of this Nobel-winning report, climate change is linked to coral reef degradation. The sole source for this claim? A Greenpeace report titled “Pacific in Peril” (see Hoegh-Guldberg below). Here the report relies on a Greenpeace document to establish the lower-end of an estimate involving solar power plants (Aringhoff).

'Gate du Jour', snork. Easier than numbering all the crap coming out.

Oh, and it turns out that Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC bigshot, knew the glacier scare was bullcrap.However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.

having dumped what appears to be a good five inches in my yard. And driveway. And walk. And porch. Between the ice and snow, the holly trees are pretty weighted down. Added to by probably fifty pounds of bird each, hiding away inside.

Speaking of which, I need to break the worst off the feederand put some feed out.

We got off easy compared to areas south & west, and a couple of years ago for that matter. Couple of years ago my spinner hanging from the carport was coated with ice and had icicles 8-10" long hanging down; there's none on it this time. Areas south & west got enough ice to break both trees and utility poles, like we got that couple of years back in this area.

Hot damn, the sun just broke through the clouds! It's supposed to hit upper 20's today, that and sunlight will do a lot of melting. Won't be able to tell that much on the city streets, especially side roads, but main roads and highways ought to do a lot of clearing.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go break the global warming off the feeder before the birds start trying to open the windows.

a damned liar.What drove Pelosi to action? Not the CIA's waterboarding of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists. In a 2009 interview, a former senior Bush administration official directed me to a little-noticed item from Time magazine. According to this 2004 report, Pelosi objected to a CIA plan to provide money to moderate political parties in Iraq ahead of scheduled elections, in an effort to counter Iran, which was funneling millions to extremist elements. "House minority leader Nancy Pelosi 'came unglued' when she learned about what a source described as a plan for 'the CIA to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections,' " Time reported. "Pelosi had strong words with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a phone call about the issue. . . . A senior U.S. official hinted that, under pressure from the Hill, the Administration scaled back its original plans." (Her role was also reported on this page by David Ignatius in 2007.)

Why is this important? Because on May 14, 2009, Pelosi, now speaker of the House, declared in a Capitol Hill news conference that she had opposed CIA waterboarding but was powerless to stop it. A former senior intelligence official told me in 2009 that he was shocked by Pelosi's claim because, he said, "Speaker Pelosi herself has stopped covert action programs that she has been briefed on by going to the White House. In that very same time frame [after she learned about waterboarding] Pelosi had gone back to the White House [over] a separate covert action program, expressed strong opposition to it. And the remarkable part to me, the White House backed off the program, changed one aspect of the program . . . she was particularly opposed to. And literally, the finding was pulled back and revised." If Pelosi had truly opposed waterboarding, he said, she had numerous ways to stop it -- but she didn't try.And let's not forget 'hypocrite'; all the whining and moaning about 'torture' and 'it's horrible', but she did nothing to actually stop what she was bitching about.

And please note: what she 'came unglued' over was the idea of providing money to political moderates to counter the money Iran was getting into the jihadi clowns; THAT was so horrible she blew up, but "I was powerless to do anything about the horrible waterboarding." Yeah.

is now a frozen crust on every horizontal(or close to) ground surface. I got about half of the driveway clear by chopping the shovel down and breaking the cover into slabs that could be shoveled off. Now I think I'll type a bit and see if I can get circulation back into my fingertips.

Why is Kirk still voting?A: The Evil Party cares not for law or right, only power.B: The Stupid Party 'leadership' doesn't have the balls to challenge this.Simple enough.

Fortunately, Obama has supplied conservatives with plenty of material.

And we’d better get busy with the ridiculing, mocking, derision, scorn, belittling, shaming, parodying, satirizing and lampooning toot sweet like our lives, homes, families, nation and the world depend on it. (Because they do.)

I think Greenwald wants the Justices to be like a mythical Roman Senator: Gravitas No Matter What. He's also a friggin' idiot who apparently believes the crap he writes:Justice Alito's flamboyantly insinuating himself into a pure political event, in a highly politicized manner, will only hasten [the Court's] decline.Let's see, a very quiet action, nothing that would even have been seen if there hadn't been a camera on him at the time, this clown calls 'flamboyant'. How about "Greenwald is a hugely biased drama queen"?

Althouse has some thoughts on Obama wanting to spend $8 billion of our money on rail lines. I'll throw in two things:One: if the government is involved in the things, they should only be lines where independant study shows they can actually show a profit.Two: Daughter has used trains on several trips, and loved them, but you have to remember a couple of things:1. She had the time; on some trips you can drive faster than the trains get there,2. she either had a ride on the far end, or only had to take a taxi to the hotel; everywhere else could walk. Doesn't do much good to save money on the train if you have to spend a fortune on taxi rides when you get there.

Just looked outside, there's light s now falling, enough to show kitty tracks across the porch since I cleaned it off about half an hour ago. Snow's fine, it was the freezing rain that scared people. Oh, and my comments the other day about no panic buying? Apparently the panic buyers waited till later than usual: according to the news the stores were packed yesterday after the crap started falling.

Come ON, people!

The state's two senators and 14 House members met with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius just hours before President Obama implored in his speech to the nation for Congress to come together and deliver a government that delivers on its promises to the American people.

So the legislators were floored to learn the Democratic administration does not want to deliver for the tens of thousands of people who sacrificed after 9/11, and the untold numbers now getting sick.Hey, The Lightbringer needs that money to pay off his union friendspay for civil trials for terrorists and enemy combatants! He has priorities!

Awright, people, we have work to do! We can't let the Aussies beat us out! I'll try to pump up(er, bad choice of words there...) the lust, what're you going to work on?

Oh, wonderful; the F22 program gets chopped up while the Russians are doing this; and anybody doubt that down the road they'll sell the things to whoever?

For a little more on the mess in Haiti, and the wonderful efforts of the UN and USAID(the miserable bastards), check this out at Theo. And, I add, reason to avoid giving money to US Airways.

Damn. Remember the mess about a possible link between the MMR vaccine and autism? Seems the doc who did the damage has been whacked. Hard.